Roadside Refugees: Photog Speaks Out on Pakistan Flood

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Roadside Refugees: Photog Speaks Out on Pakistan Flood

It has been over eight weeks since the devastating flood waters began their southward surge through Pakistan. The number of people affected by the floods in Pakistan exceeds 20 million — a figure, noted by the United Nations as more than the combined total of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

Conditions on the ground remain desperate; more than 10,000 schools have been damaged and closed, over half the victims affected are children and over 100,000 face the immediate threat of starvation. Infrastructure, particularly bridges, lie in pieces and food distribution routes are compromised.

Raw File talked with photojournalist Asim Rafiqui about his thoughts on the international aid efforts, the response of the Pakistan government and the prospects for survivors. Rafiqui photographed displaced survivors along a stretch of the Grand Trunk Road near the towns of Mehmood Kot and Multan. They had been living on the highway divider for three weeks when Rafiqui met them.

Wired.com: Were these people recognized as being in need and were they going to receive help from government or aid agencies? Or is it a case of waiting for waters to abate to then piece a life and home together?

____Asim Rafiqui (AR): One of the most striking things about this particular catastrophe has been the absence of a government response and the absence of official relief organizations, infrastructure and administration. What one sees, of at least during the weeks that I was working in the region around Multan, were various small relief camps being run by private individuals or private welfare organizations.

Many Pakistani communities also organized relief supplies and sent out trucks to various localities - these too could be seen parked along the sides of the road handing out basic foodstuffs and clothes. However there was no coordinated and organized relief response in the region and none of the people I spoke to seemed to know where to go or whom to turn to for assistance. They were getting sporadic supplies - some water, and occasionally some food, but they were not part of a broad, organized, and appropriately administered relief effort.

Wired.com: In your observations, has the aid effort been adequate?

AR: It's near impossible to judge that. On the ground and through direct conversations it all appeared a complete mess. No organization or coordination, an absolute absence of government relief personnel, institutions and structure. However, we have to remember two things. First, that this is a catastrophe that would have overwhelmed any government and its emergency response institutions. Lest we forget, FEMA completely collapsed in the face of the Katrina disaster.

Second, the waters moved with speed and unpredictability that could not be anticipated. Add to this the fact that numerous man-made breaches of embankments, determined more by the influence of elite landlords and industrialists, forced water toward areas where it should not have gone; waters inundated and displaced tens of thousands who should not have been affected.

Faced with all this, it is near impossible to determine an action plan that one could call adequate. Add to this the general incompetence and bureaucratic failure of the national disaster management agencies and you have what can only be judged to be a population abandoned to its wits and resolve. But as the waters receded, or came to a standstill, one did begin to see a more organized effort and greater presence of private relief and welfare institutions. The international agencies, particularly the United Nations, were of course extremely visible and perhaps the best prepared with teams, information, maps and relief teams on the ground.

Wired.com: Wired ran an article about Floodmaps and PakReport, two social media platforms that crowdsource info on devastation from aid agencies and from flood victims. What sort of use do these tools get on the ground? Would any of the people in your pictures been aware of the tools?

AR: The waters have displaced some of the poorest, most marginalized sections of the country's population. It is naive to think that people who are near-subsistence farmers, whose villages lack adequate electricity and sewage treatment facilities, whose inhabitants are largely illiterate and most importantly, who are downtrodden and repressed by a system of economic and social exploitation, to not only know about, but to trust in the efficacy of such technology tools.

We forget that understanding the value of data (the use of that data to make it into information) is a privilege of an educated society. A person must understand the meaning of the information, and trust that it can be transformed into action. In Pakistan we have two issues; not only can't an illiterate society know what data can be transformed into worthwhile information, but it has no awareness or even trust, that at the other end of the information cycle are institutions and organizations that will react, respond and deliver. A people in peril are sending data not to create pretty data maps, but to ask for a helicopter to come and save their families.

Wired.com: Why has aid to Pakistan been slower than other humanitarian crises, say Haiti for example?

AR: This question has been asked many times and I can't claim to have an answer for it. I will say that I think it is not the most important question at all. The world does not owe Pakistan relief aid, or charity or a coordinated response. With all due respect to the people of Haiti, whose troubled history with colonialism and modern-day corporate imperialism, I will say that Pakistan is not Haiti. Pakistan's infrastructures are far more organized and sophisticated and she possesses extensive resources (economic, social, political, administrative, etc.) than a nation like Haiti. It is a failure of the country's government and its disaster management institutions that is the key issue here. We have to remember that even Pakistanis themselves refused to offer funds to the government. So why should we lament the slow response of others?

There is little trust in this government, none in its incompetent institutions, and none in the leadership which instead of rolling up their sleeves and arriving at locations of disaster chose to jump in private jets to European capitals. A certain segment of the nation has become addicted to foreign aid and each time there is a catastrophe their first reaction is to run to the coffers of foreign donors while leaving ignored and under-funded our own relief and emergency response institutions, and our political and bureaucratic responsibility toward the citizens of this country. The world does not owe Pakistan anything. Those who complain about the slow response are avoiding admitting that it is their own failure that has then required the need of a foreign response!

Of course, foreign aid is needed and support should be asked for, but it quickly became the most important question and I think that that is unfair. The NDMA has failed us, the government has revealed itself to be incompetent and filled to the brim with venal, self-serving and clueless individuals with little or no relationship to the people devastated by the floods.

For example, a minister's visit to the affected in Sukker, Sindh, led to the grounding of relief flights. The Prime Minister’s own constituency in Muzzaffabad was devastated but he had not bothered to come down to see and commiserate with the affected. There is aloofness, a divide, between those in power and those in peril.

We have seen many photo-ops with Ministers and parliamentarians. The efforts that go toward orchestrating these reveal that we are able to organize and execute if we just put our minds to it! If aid has been slow to come, it may be because the sense of the horror unfolding has been slow to make its impact on those in power who are largely immune to its effects.

Wired.com: You are a strong critic of the media on your blog, The Spinning Head. What are your impressions on the news coverage of the Pakistan floods?

AR: I think that the Pakistani media has been very professional and very dogged about covering the unfolding catastrophe. And they continue to do so.

Perhaps most egregious has been the coverage of the American media which has largely ignored the scope and scale of this situation and its meaning for the nation's political and social future. They have continued to instead focus on 'The War Against Terror' angle even as millions were facing the loss of their lives and futures. However, this media angle reflects well the American administration's silence on the catastrophe and their continued insistence of judging all things in the country through the prism of 'The War Against Terror.' But then again, when you have only viewed the nation through that limited prism for well over a decade its hard to change tack.

The European newspapers have been far more engaged, with a number of magazines sending reporters and photographers and TV news channels sending their teams down here for extensive coverage. I myself was sent here for a long reportage by a German magazine whereas my agency in New York did not even bother to call to see if perhaps I was thinking of heading down there to cover the situation. So the coverage has varied, but I think we would do well to understand the variations on the basis of the broader socio-political structures that define Pakistan's relations with the region and its media. But again, the media that has mattered the most, the one that had the major responsibility to cover this situation with gravity and professionalism was the Pakistani media and I believe that they have done so.

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The New York Times's Lede blog has a list of organizationsthat are working to provide disaster relief to Pakistan.

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Asim Rafiquiis an independent photographer based in Stockholm, Sweden. He has been working professionally since 2003 and has been focusing on issues related to the aftermath of conflict. This focus has led him to produce work from Iraqi Kurdistan, Haiti, Israel, The Palestinian Occupied Territories and the tribal areas of Pakistan. He has also regularly shot assignments for magazines like National Geographic (France), Stern (Germany), The Wall Street Journal Magazine, Newsweek, and Time (USA, Asia). He blogs atThe Spinning Head, and is building a projectThe Idea of India.

Pete Brook is a writer, photo-researcher and prison educator based in Seattle. He writes regularly about photography at his blog Prison Photography.